Outstanding teachers to be parachuted into England's struggling rural schools
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Loading... - GEMMA BROWN
- 04 Nov 2020
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An army of outstanding teachers is to be parachuted into struggling schools in England’s coastal towns and rural areas to eradicate poor performance.
Up to 1,500 teachers will be drafted into underperforming schools over the next five years - with a focus on those who are ”coasting”, i.e resting on their laurels when they could be improving their performance. Education Secretary Nicky Morgan has announced.
The teachers will be part of a newly set up National Teaching Service - and will be expected to complete up to three years in schools, gaining experience which could fast-track them to senior management jobs.
Ms Morgan said it was unlikely they would send just one teacher into a struggling school - but three or four so they could feed off each other and help improve the performance of existing staff.
“We can’t simply have most of our best teachers concentrated in some areas - that isn’t a ‘One Nation’ education, far from it,” she said while addressing an audience at the right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange’s headquarters in London.
“Coastal towns and rural areas struggle because they struggle to recruit and retain good teachers, they lack that vital ingredient that makes for a successful education.
“The National Teaching Service will play a key part in solving this problem.”
Ms Morgan made the announcement as one of a series of policy initiatives in her first major speech on education since the election.
She began with a savage criticism of Labour’s education policies - accusing the party while in government of committing a “pernicious fraud” on a generation of young people - by allowing grade inflation and promoting “worthless” vocational qualifications.
“Rather than striving for excellence which risked exposing those schools which weren’t up to the mark, they sought instead to level everyone down to the bottom,” she said.
“Rather than creating gold standard qualifications they downgraded them to the lowest common denominator while inflating top grades. They prided themselves on the ever-rising results. But they weren’t real.”
She added: “Teenagers got more certificates and school results seemed to improve. But the qualifications weren’t credible in the jobs market ... They were, to be frank, a fraud on the young people taking them.”
She said the policy may have been motivated by “kindness but it was “a kindness driven by tacit snobbery”. It was based on a supposition that “certain kids - and let’s be honest ‘kids like these’ meant kids from poorer homes - could not succeed academically”.
The attitude that we should not expect an academic education for all our children dominated the system “and however well-intentioned it might have been it was fundamentally pernicious”.
As a result, she said that she thought every child should study maths, English, history or geography, a language and the sciences up to the age of 16.
Asked about the new University Technical Colleges - which specialising in teaching pupils skills like engineering and construction from the age of 14, she replied: “What I don’t want is that just because it is a certain type of school, we’re not going to offer a core curriculum.”
However, David Harbourne, acting chief executive of the Edge Foundation - the charity which campaigns for raising the status of vocational education and supports the UTCs, said: “Nicky Morgan’s decision to impose subject options on young people fails to take into account students whose talent, enthusiasm and future career may be best served by practical, technical or vocational options.
“There is no evidence that forcing students to take exams in foreign languages makes a difference to their long-term prospects. Right now, around 330,000 young people drop languages at 14. Making languages compulsory is setting them up for failure.”
